Wait for the ground, not the calendar
The most common spring mistake around here is going too early. Saturated turf tears under foot traffic and rutts under equipment, and the damage you do in a soft first week takes until June to grow out. The test is simple: walk on it. If your boot prints stay, it is too wet. We would rather push a cleanup back a week than fix divots all season.
Rake the matting off before anything else
Snow sitting on unraked grass all winter leaves a flattened, greyish mat, and under a heavy year that mat is snow mould. Left flat it blocks light and holds moisture against the crown, and you get thin or bare patches by June. Raking it out to get air and light to the soil is the single highest-value thing you can do in April — higher value than fertiliser, higher than seed.
Get the winter sand off the edges
Anywhere a plough or a sander ran, the turf edge along the drive and road picks up sand, gravel and salt. It smothers the grass and dulls every mower blade that touches it later. Blowing and raking that back off the turf takes minutes and saves an edge that otherwise takes half the season to recover.
Hold the seed and most of the fertiliser
Early spring feeding pushes fast top growth on a plant that has not rebuilt its roots yet, and grass seed dropped into cold soil mostly rots or feeds birds. Around here the serious overseeding window is late August into September, when the soil is still warm and the weed competition has eased off. A spring green-up feeding is fine; a spring rescue plan usually is not.
Get the irrigation charged slowly
If the property has sprinklers, bring the system up gradually and walk every zone while it is running. Pressurising a cold system fast is how a fitting that survived the winter fails in April. This is also when you find the head that got clipped last August and has been watering the driveway ever since.
A proper spring clean-up is the visit everything else is built on. If you would rather not spend a weekend on it, that is what we are for.
